Practice Adoption and Projects
The farmers were asked to respond to multiple types of greenhouse gas reducing activities, and I combined their responses to see how many activities had already been adopted by a farm and how many activities that farm was also open to adopting. In this analysis, the independent variables are: farm activities (categorical), farm size in acres (continuous), and greenhouse gas reduction activities and projects (categorical). The dependent variable is represented by the responses of the farmers to the greenhouse gas reduction activities and projects questions, which range from 1-5 or 1-6. The responses were originally recorded for each practice or project, and I gathered the responses into Table 3, which was then used to create Graphs 3 (Projects), 4 (Beef Practices), and 5 (Crop Practices). These graphs show that there are noticeable rates of adoption for the practices we asked about. Some popular projects include LED lights, solar panels, and making farm buildings more energy efficient, a popular crop farm practice is to leave/spread crop residue in fields after harvest, and for beef practices manure composting, making animal breeding decisions to improve feed efficiency, and introducing legumes or other nitrogen fixers into grazing lands are all popular.